Medicaid and Divorce

Once again, while I listening to the Morning Edition on NPR on my way to work, I heard an interesting story by Shankar Vedantam in which he examined how Medicaid expansion has affected divorce rates among older people. See the whole story with audio and transcript at http://www.npr.org/2017/03/08/519170657/the-affordable-care-act-medicaid-and-divorce

“States that did not expand Medicaid …effectively became a control group. (the researchers) Slusky and his colleague Donna Ginther decided to look at what the effect of the Medicaid expansion was on the divorce rate.” For reasons explained in the story the researchers found, “in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA, among people age 50 to 64, there’s a decrease in the prevalence of divorce by about 5 percent compared to states that didn’t go along with the idea. It shows you how health insurance can have effects far beyond people’s medical health.”

The reason for this was that “there was an important change under the ACA where the Medicaid expansion did away with asset tests. You still had to have a certain amount of income to qualify for Medicaid, but there were no asset tests. In other words, couples no longer had a financial incentive to split up in order to protect the assets of the healthy spouse.”